Professor A. Tobias Grace: Reading

Press Release, The Principality of Gottenheim Bureau of Tourist Information, Building Inspection and Bee Keeping.

Beautiful Gottenheim beckons you. Spend an hour and a half in our historic country. You can see the whole place in 45 minutes, which leaves ample time for lunch. Gottenheim Castle is home to our genuine, papered & pedigreed prince, with whom you can shake hands for a dollar (higher rates apply for encouraging words, compliments and vague generalities regarding the weather.) We also have a beautiful princess of course. Admittedly, getting her to actually be a princess presented some challenges, since she started out as a castle scullery boy, but in Gottenheim we say “show us a challenge and we’ll think a lot and probably write a book about it.” In fact, that is precisely what we have done and the book is titled “The Unusual Occurrence at Gottenheim.” It’s a very short book but then, we are a very small country. Even so, we were not without problems caused by the inevitable wicked stepmother and the customary evil prime minister of the Kingdom Next Door. Still, love will find a way even if it sometimes needs a complete make-over and maybe a little cosmetic surgery. A reading of “The Unusual Occurrence at Gottenheim” by Professor A. Tobias Grace will explain it all.

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Bio: Professor A. Tobias Grace, MA

Unlike some in the Steampunk Universe, Professor Grace is an actual professor (History, Mercer County College) but has not permitted this exalted distinction to elevate his level of intellectual snobbery, which was already off the chart anyway and couldn’t be made any worse. In a long and checkered career, he has been a stripper, a lumberjack , a circus wagon builder, a barker in a traveling medicine show on the county fair circuit through New England and the Mid-West, an artist, a poet, a magazine editor, a gay rights activist and a teacher. Now in his senior years, the accumulated wisdom of these varied experiences is of no actual use except to provide a fund of stories with which he can test the patience of his husband and adoptive sons by frequently repeating. They live in a large, old, slightly ramshackle house in Trenton, filled with thousands of books and managed by Jasper, a cat who is the adult in charge.